It was 1935 Warsaw, and a small traveling troop of Jewish actors were playing the “shtetl circuit,” as they half affectionately, half mockingly called it. They did vaudeville, they did Shakespeare, they did the Bible. Raisel (Donna Murphy) as Moses’ wife: “You’re going to do what? You can’t even part your hair!” The times are dark and the troop reaches for answers in absurdity: “A pogrom is not an easy act to follow.”
May 31, 2011 | Posted in
Theater |
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Michael Halberstam’s chamber music version of Shaw’s “Candida” is a charming and exhilarating production about male-female relations in earlier days of the battle for women’s sexual freedom. The story is adapted by Austin Pendleton from Shaw’s 1898 version of the play, which he revised in 1930, when post-flapper era so much in society had changed. At the turn of the century, women were even more psychologically and materially dependent on their husbands.
May 26, 2011 | Posted in
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Surreal, sometimes funny, often cruel, Rajiv Joseph’s play in a stunning production by Moisés Kaufman looks at killing, in war, and among beasts, and wonders if it is a primordial instinct, something that somehow infects people who think they “don’t do that.” It is a powerful production, not your typical war story, as the murder victims come back as ghosts.
May 25, 2011 | Posted in
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Tom Stoppard’s 1993 “Arcadia” plays with truth and illusion and shows how easy it is to be deceived. It sets true intellectuals devoted to search and discovery against glory-seeking “scholars” who invent convenient truths. Stoppard, as he is good at doing, mixes truth about historical figures with fantasy about their connections with the protagonists in a way that adds to the fascination of the plot.
May 22, 2011 | Posted in
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The struggles of the working class are starkly depicted in David Lindsay-Abaire’s striking portrait of a handful of friends in Boston’s Southie neighborhood. At a time when economic decisions by the government leave millions of workers in the dust, it’s a political as well as social commentary.
May 14, 2011 | Posted in
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Like the wind and rain storm that swirls around him as he wanders lands he once oversaw, Derek Jacobi blows fiercely in fury at his faithless daughters. His face is red almost to bursting in disbelief. His eyes could sear with their gaze. Yet, in Jacobi’s powerful, dominating portrayal in the Donmar Warehouse production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, this King Lear’s howling anger at how his royal state has been eclipsed is the other side of a royal flaw. It is the mistake of the self-absorbed and powerful who believe the ingratiating lies of their courtiers. And relatives. Both Lear and his loyal Earl of Gloucester (Paul Jesson, quietly moving in his misery) are outmaneuvered by evil progeny.
May 12, 2011 | Posted in
Theater |
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